Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts

Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts PDF Author: Sarah Covington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429671385
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.

Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts

Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts PDF Author: Sarah Covington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429671385
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book

Book Description
The Reformation was one of the defining cultural turning points in Western history, even if there is a longstanding stereotype that Protestants did away with art and material culture. Rather than reject art and aestheticism, Protestants developed their own aesthetic values, which Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts addresses as it identifies and explains the link between theological aesthetics and the arts within a Protestant framework across five-hundred years of history. Featuring essays from an international gathering of leading experts working across a diverse set of disciplines, Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts is the first study of its kind, containing essays that address Protestantism and the fine arts (visual art, music, literature, and architecture), and historical and contemporary Protestant theological perspectives on the subject of beauty and imagination. Contributors challenge accepted preconceptions relating to the boundaries of theological aesthetics and religiously determined art; disrupt traditional understandings of periodization and disciplinarity; and seek to open rich avenues for new fields of research. Building on renewed interest in Protestantism in the study of religion and modernity and the return to aesthetics in Christian theological inquiry, this volume will be of significant interest to scholars of Theology, Aesthetics, Art and Architectural History, Literary Criticism, and Religious History.

The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe

The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: William A. Dyrness
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493351
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The aesthetics of everyday life, as reflected in art museums and galleries throughout the western world, is the result of a profound shift in aesthetic perception that occurred during the Renaissance and Reformation. In this book, William A. Dyrness examines intellectual developments in late Medieval Europe, which turned attention away from a narrow range liturgical art and practices and towards a celebration of God's presence in creation and in history. Though threatened by the human tendency to self-assertion, he shows how a new focus on God's creative and recreative action in the world gave time and history a new seriousness, and engendered a broad spectrum of aesthetic potential. Focusing in particular on the writings of Luther and Calvin, Dyrness demonstrates how the reformers' conceptual and theological frameworks pertaining to the role of the arts influenced the rise of realistic theater, lyric poetry, landscape painting, and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Art in Action

Art in Action PDF Author: Nicholas Wolterstorff
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802818164
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Taking vigorous issue with the pervasive Western notion that the arts exist essentially for the purpose of aesthetic contemplation, Nicholas Wolterstorff proposes instead what he sees as an authentically Christian perspective: that art has a legitimate, even necessary, place in everyday life. While granting that galleries, theaters and concert halls serve a valid purpose, Wolterstorff argues that art should also be appreciated in action -- in private homes, in hotel lobbies, in factories and grocery stores, on main street. His conviction that art should be multifunction is basic to the author's views on art in the city (he regards most American cities as dehumanizing wastelands of aesthetic squalor, dominated by the demands of the automobile), and leads him to a helpful discussion of its role in worship and the church. Developing an aesthetic that is basically grounded, yet always sensitive to the human need for beauty, Wolterstorff make a brilliant contribution to understanding how art can serve to broaden and enrich our lives.

Christianity, Art and Transformation

Christianity, Art and Transformation PDF Author: John W. de Gruchy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521772051
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This book explores the historical and contemporary relationship between the arts and Christianity.

What is Protestant Art?

What is Protestant Art? PDF Author: Andrew T. Coates
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004375392
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
What is Protestant Art? explores the history of Protestant images from the Reformation to the present. The book analyses historical images such as prints, paintings, illustrations, and maps, as evidence of changing Protestant attitudes and visual practices.

Visual Faith

Visual Faith PDF Author: William A. Dyrness
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 0801022975
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
An intriguing, substantive look into the relationship between the church and the world of art.

The Art of the Sacred

The Art of the Sacred PDF Author: Graham Howes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857710613
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The field of 'art and religion' is fast becoming one of the most dynamic areas of religious studies. Uniquely, "The Art of the Sacred" explores the relationship between religion and the visual arts - and vice versa - within Christianity and other major religious traditions. It identifies and describes the main historical, theological, sociological and aesthetic dimensions of 'religious' art, with particular attention to 'popular' as well as 'high' culture, and within societies of the developing world. It also attempts to locate, and predict, the forms and functions of such art in a changing contemporary context of obligation, modernity, secularism and fundamentalism. The author concentrates on four chief dimensions where religious art and religious belief converge: the iconographic; the didactic; the institutional; and the aesthetic. This clear, well-organised and imaginative treatment of the subject should prove especially attractive to students of religion and visual culture, as well as to artists and art historians.

Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation

Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant Reformation PDF Author: Victoria George
Publisher: Pindar Press
ISBN: 1915837138
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This book is a reconsideration of the practice of whitewashing church interiors during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is the first detailed study of its kind which challenges the view that whitewash was always only a 'cheap coat of paint'. Victoria George pulls together several histories: of the colour white from the biblical period to the present, and ideas about the colour white in philosophy, theology, art, and architecture from antiquity to the present. She links them to case studies of the ways in which reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin thought about colour in a careful analysis of the role of colour-thinking in their theological writings. The social meanings embodied in the word, 'whitewash' as it entered the printed media in the 17th century is explored as part of a chapter on the history of whitewashing itself. The long-term symbolic and aesthetic implications of the practice of whitewashing are examined in the larger context of material culture; in terms of their value as a metaphor, for both the Reformed Protestant and the Catholic in opposition to them; and for the uses to which whitewash has been put over time. George proposes that the practice was not only visually transformative but held importance for religious aesthetics as an agent of change, and for an aesthetics of minimalism generally, especially evident in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Victoria George received an MFA from the Royal College of Art (London), an MA from The Architectural Association, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge. She has taught religion and the arts at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

A Redemptive Theology of Art

A Redemptive Theology of Art PDF Author: David A. Covington
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
ISBN: 0310534372
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
A Redemptive Theology of Art develops a biblical, systematic, and practical theology of aesthetics. It begins with the roots and ontology of aesthetics (vs. "art") and the architecture and narrative of affection and passion, their woes and their glory. Those who would search the Bible find little support for "art" as commonly conceived in the West. The language of aesthetics, applied to the maker’s intentions, the qualities of the work, and the responses of the audience, better addresses the questions of beauty, and better suits the discussion of human actions, beliefs, and culture than the language of art does. The Bible yields more consistent and helpful answers to questions about the broader category of aesthetics than it does to questions about art; leading in turn to better questions and a more practical and theological appreciation of human affections, beauty, and delight, and the many paths by which people, including Christians, pursue them. Using the categories and definitions from Scripture, Covington gives hope and help not only for those who labor in the arts, but for everyone who cares about the passions that motivate us. We were made for God's delight, and, though sin and bondage plague our passions, God can shape our fun, feelings, desires, affections and aversions. Feelings are neither objective nor subjective; they are redeemable. Borrowing key ideas from other Christian writers on the arts or aesthetics, Covington explores the connection between orthodox Protestant theology and a responsible, respectful treatment of arts, artists, and all aesthetic fields of human work and speech.

Good Taste, Bad Taste, & Christian Taste

Good Taste, Bad Taste, & Christian Taste PDF Author: Frank Burch Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195158724
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive, "ecumenical" approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has "teeth but no fangs." While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in the making of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.